Anti-SOPA/PIPA Blackout on Wednesday

On Wednesday, Jan 18th, Modern Edge will join Wikipedia, Google, Mozilla, WordPress, and countless others in protest of SOPA and PIPA by blacking out our website for 24 hours.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are proposed laws in the US House of Representatives and US Senate respectively, which, if passed, will enable widespread censorship of the Internet without due process of law. Under the guise of safeguarding copyright and intellectual property rights, these bills will grant corporations and private entities nearly unlimited power to restrict the content published to the world. They will cripple social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by requiring them to police and censor the statements of their users. They will give the US Attorney General the power to block domain names and remove them from search engines, which endangers not only American websites but also sites from anywhere in the world.

In recent years, the Internet has proved itself to be an indispensable resource for promoting human rights, free speech, and positive change worldwide. The internet has amassed the vast information and the knowledge of humankind and has changed the way we share it. Twitter has been used during revolutions as a way to share the local struggle with the world beyond the control of authoritarian governments, Google search provides uncensored news sources for a truly free society and, Wikipedia holds an invaluable repository of information in dozens of languages. All of this is threatened by SOPA and PIPA.

We at Modern Edge are dedicated to the free exchange of information worldwide because we believe that open exchange drives innovation, and innovation improves the human condition. Our goal as designers and human beings is to leave the world a better place than we found it, and we cannot support legislation which restricts open communication and access to knowledge that benefits humanity. As American citizens, we value free speech and the right to legal equality. We uphold these basic rights to be true across borders and without reservation. It is clear that willingly embracing the very censorship which we have worked to remove from other countries is absurd, and we stand with the majority of innovators and citizens who believe that the human spirit is best served by a free and open society.